Emerging Patterns of Management Accounting Research

Management accounting has come to play an important role in modern organizational life. It is directly implicated in attempts to increase the efficiency of organizations by providing a basis for assessing the costs and benefits of actions, both actual and potential. It provides information which can often facilitate management decision-making. Of equal importance, management accounting systems have helped to further the implementation of particular organizational structures and patterns of responsibility (Chandler, 1962; Chandler and Daems, 1979). Not only has management accounting articulated powerful images of organizational missions, objectives and expectations (Batstone, 1979) but also it has come to be an influential source of information for the monitoring and assessment of actual achievements. Indeed it is precisely in these ways that management accounting systems have become quite centrally involved in the running of organizations as we now know them. At their best, it is now understood that they can play a very positive role in helping to shape the views which organizational participants have of the significant, the problematic, the desirable and the possible.